Public Loneliness: Yuri Gagarin's Circumlunar Flight (5 page)

I’d known everything was going to
be different. That was when I knew it would also be beyond my control.

•••

But now, at least, everything is
back under control.

I’m on my way to the moon, and
the first phase of my journey is over, and I have to get used to something I’ve
never had in space: routine. The basics of life—eating and sleeping, and all
those other bodily functions one doesn’t discuss in polite company. I am a real
man, after all.

We are no longer eating from
tubes—now there are meal packs. I eat sausages, carrots and chocolate, then set
their empty weightless containers spinning like satellites, like space
stations. From my water pack I take a long pull with the straw, then pull the
straw out and squeeze the water back out. It hangs suspended, a shimmering
crystal globule that quivers in front of me. I stab it with the straw, suck it
down a few sizes, and then I make a jerky move and it splits in half. I try to
gobble each half up but don’t quite get the second. It clings strangely to my
face—with no gravity, it doesn’t drip off. I root around for a sponge to dry
myself.

There are a few things to do
after lunch, but not much. Solar radiation measurements. Deployment of the
high-gain antenna, which will transmit the television signal back to earth.

Then we test the television
system, which looks not all that different from the one on East-1, although
here the technical specifications are better, and there is an additional camera
mounted externally. I turn on the lamp that’s bolted to the instrument console
and squint into its glare. Then I settle back into my couch. I see one of the
packages from lunch floating up by the camera and swat it out of the way.

“Let me know if I’m in sight,
Dawn-2.”

“I see you, Yura!” Blondie says
in my ear. “Smile for us.”

I give a smile but it feels
forced. (There’s something in the eyes you can’t fake, some emotional energy
you transmit involuntarily when you’re really and truly happy. And you receive
a bit of it, looking at someone else who’s truly happy. It seems like something
worthy of study, like lasers and reflectors, but then again it seems like
something you’d know intuitively already, one of those experiments whose
results don’t surprise.) The camera’s inscrutable eye does not change, does not
twinkle to catch the light, does not always make me want to smile back. It is a
problem with which I am well familiar.

“Good,” Blondie says. “Now show
us the moon. I’ll give you the coordinates.”

He reads up the translations in
the x, y, and z axes that will get the external camera properly oriented. There
is some stickiness to the z-axis translation and it takes a few thrusts back
and forth before I’m correctly oriented. But once the numbers on the console
have changed by the proper amounts, I call it out.

“It’s at the right bottom of the
frame,” Blondie responds, so I make a couple quick pulses with the thrusters
and he’s happy. Meanwhile I see nothing.

“I’d like to get a look myself,”
I tell him.

“Very well.”

After a quick pulse, I can see
the moon in the porthole, half full. Already it is looking bigger. For every
other human in recorded history it has been the same size. But not me, not now.

•••

The second day after East-1, they
flew me to Moscow.

I had been a nobody, a simple
fighter pilot in his late 20s, and now I was descending to the tarmac to report
to Khrushchev himself. Such a staged spectacle! Amidst all my smiling and
waving on the way down the airplane stairs, I remember thinking how silly it
was. As if Khrushchev didn’t know the flight was a success! If it hadn’t been,
I wouldn’t be here.

Still, I felt confident: I had
checked myself off in the small mirror of the airplane lavatory, and every time
I turned my head I saw the shoulder boards of my new rank, these unfamiliar
symbols of the state’s approval. But at the bottom of the stairs: catastrophe.
I realized my shoelace was untied. Ahead of me lay the red carpet, the dais,
the dignitaries and the cameras and Khrushchev himself, and everyone was
looking, and there was no way to tie my shoe. For a brief moment I imagined
tripping, losing my shoe, or worse, falling on my face in front of the world.
Believe me, I was more nervous than I had been orbiting the earth!

But I strode off smartly. Saluted
and reported. Nobody else noticed the shoelace, not then. And Khrushchev was
obviously elated. Another son of the soil made good.

Then it was time for the
motorcade to Red Square. Getting into the car, I at last had time to tie my
shoe. We rolled on through the city, past more people than I ever would have
imagined. And after that, standing on Lenin’s tomb, looking out at the
crowd—they seemed genuinely happy. There were immense posters of Lenin, and
next to them, equally large, posters of me. I smiled and waved and thought
constantly, first and foremost, that I had better not make an ass of myself.
And thought: do I really deserve all of this?

That night, they brought me by
the control room of the state television station to review footage of the day’s
festivities. My untied shoelace was clearly visible.

“We can go ahead and take that
footage out, sir,” the technician said.

“No. Leave it in. I insist.” I
figured: let them know I’m a real man.

•••

Another silent meal.

More food packs. This time, veal
and cheese. Better than what I had in the isolation chamber, but still, it depresses
me. Although I’m the first man to truly voyage out into the solar system, we
are not yet capable of living here. Existing for brief periods of time, yes.
Eking out a few days of life in the midst of a vast and all-consuming
nothingness. But that’s all. No life, in the grand and full sense. Just
preventing death. How long will it be before space feels like home? Perhaps it
will be different when we have bases on the moon, on Venus, on Mars. Places to
go. Beds to lay down on at night.

(It might have been better had
this been a two-man voyage. It was supposed to be, originally—as much as I
enjoyed being first on East-1, this time I’d wanted someone along for the ride.
I’m not a narcissist, after all! Not so eager for triumph that I need to hoard
it all for myself. And we were training as a two-man crew—myself as commander
and Kubasov as flight engineer. But, of all things, it turned out the designers
were having a hard time with the loads for the parachute system, and the burden
on the environmental system. And the easiest way to make sure both would work
properly was to remove one cosmonaut and launch couch, subtracting a set of
lungs and a couple hundred kilograms so as to bring all the equations within
the safety margins.)

The 7K-L1 is hurtling moonward,
but more slowly now. Second cosmic velocity means I’ve acquired enough speed to
escape earth’s gravity, but it doesn’t mean earth’s gravity has no effect on
me. So my ship will get slower and slower and slower over the next couple days
until I’m in the moon’s sphere of influence, at which point I’ll start
accelerating once more. I cannot feel this—it affects me the same way as it
affects my craft, so my body has no motion relative to the walls of the ship.
All I know is numbers and readouts. My body floats in weightless oblivion.

I realize that, in my eagerness
to get the television testing done, I’d not done a thorough job of cleaning
after lunch. The empty package I’d swatted away is now over by the intake for
the environmental system. I grab it, then see a couple stray bits of food that
somehow got loose. It’s strange cleaning in space: you can’t just assemble a
pile of trash. You can take something, some bit of rubbish, and assign it its
own airspace and it will stay there, as long as it’s not too close to the
intakes or outlets for the environmental system. But then if you bump into it,
it will go caroming off into some hard-to-reach spot that will force you to
bend your arm like a contortionist just to get it, like when something rolls
under your bed.

The problem’s made worse by the
fact that one must take care of all one’s bodily functions in this weightless
environment, and any errors can result in disgusting little brown specks or
yellow globules floating about the cabin along with everything else. (It occurs
to me that, for all its fun, weightlessness is also chaotic, whereas gravity at
least imposes a certain order on things: unwanted objects fall to the ground
and either disappear down drains and sewers, or remain there to be swept up and
disposed of in the dustbin.)

When at last all the housekeeping
chores are done, I settle in for my sleep period.

One can’t call it night, of
course, for there’s no night in cosmic space. And it turns out that one of the
nightshades for the portholes is stuck and won’t come down. The moon ship must
rotate about the solar axis for the bulk of the trip, so there’s nothing to be
done, no way to keep out the sun.

The sleep periods have been
scheduled to coincide with gaps in our transmission coverage. (The relay ships
can do in a pinch, but we’re trying to rely on land-based stations and Molinya
satellites for the bulk of our transmissions at translunar distances.) Given my
excitement about the flight, and assorted other household issues, I didn’t get
a lot of sleep on my last few nights in our apartment in Star City, nor did I
get much the night before the launch, since I had to wake up early. I’m tired,
and longing for one night of clean full sleep to get caught up.

But: nothing.

I think of Valya, and our
children. (Are you judging me now, for taking so long to mention my wife? You
shouldn’t. On such adventures, it’s best not to clutter one’s mind with
thoughts of home, particularly when there’s work to be done.) Valya knew
something was up before I left; I couldn’t entirely contain my excitement. And
of course, in the ways of women everywhere, she took that as an excuse to be
petulant and pouty. (Women are of course nervous about things like
spaceflight—a judgment born of ignorance, like all judgments, perhaps. Forgive
me. Tereshkova is of course excepted, though she and her ilk are the exceptions
that prove the rule.) Although my wife didn’t know for sure I’d be going into
space, there were enough similarities with the last time that she suspected it.
She wants me to be happy with her and the kids, at home. She doesn’t want me to
be off doing dangerous things. (Unless of course I’ve been home for more days
than normal, in which case she wants me out of her hair. Surely this is how it
is for everyone! None of this should be foreign to you! Further from the eye,
closer to the heart.)

Still nothing. No sleep.

I watch the spot of sunlight from
the porthole as it slices a slow circular path across the inside of the ship’s
hull. Moving in phases: narrow stab wound to slender ellipse, fattening into a
circle, then waning and disappearing.

I try again to get comfortable.
The problem of the arms is paramount. On their own, they float up, and one gets
worried about bumping a switch. And worry, of course, is the thief of sleep. I
try to tuck my thumbs under my straps, but then of course there are issues of
circulation.

To be a real man means to
explore, to test one’s limits, to see how far one can get and still make it
back home. I would have taken my wife and our daughters with me if it were
possible, although of course it isn’t, so perhaps this is just an empty wish,
wasted words.

I fall asleep.

I wake up.

I fall asleep.

I wake up.

•••

As I said before, everything
changed after my flight. I was born again, deposited into a new life; my
closest connections were the same, but everything beyond them was not, and even
every interaction with them felt different.

And my role was new: I was a
representative of the state. When they realized how my flight had captured
imaginations, not just in the Soviet Union, but in the world-at-large, they
sent me on tour. I had never left my country before my flight; now I was going
everywhere. A whirlwind tour.

I’m proud to say I handled myself
well, for the most part.

In Manchester, when I visited
England, it was raining severely. But people had lined up in the streets to see
me all the same! (Here and there I was being compared to President Kennedy. It
was embarrassing, but I suppose I can see why: we were both young faces for our
countries. Proof that we were moving dynamically forward into a better future.
Countries need their old faces, too—their Khrushchevs, their Eisenhowers. But
people do get bored of the past, and yearn for something new. Youth and hope
and strength and vigor. Potential. I did not expect this level of excitement,
let me assure you! It was truly humbling, and a reminder of something
fundamentally human: the desire for better accomplishments, longer trips,
progress: the relentless march away from the dustbin of history and towards a
clean and new future.)

The trade union that had
sponsored my visit had arranged for a motorcade, a train of black convertibles
to take me through the city and give the masses a chance to see me. But they
had put the tops up on the cars, because of the rain.

Soon, we were inching through the
rain-slick streets. I’d seen the crowds at the airport. I didn’t expect them
elsewhere. But when I wiped the fog from the car’s inside windows I saw: they
were still there! Lining the roads, despite the awful weather! Crowds of wet
people, blurry shapes in the rain—all there to see me!

“Stop the car. Put the top down,”
I told the driver.

Kamanin gave me a look.

“If they’re willing to stand in
the rain to see me, I should at least return the favor,” I told him, with a
grin.

And so we rode, open-topped,
through Manchester. The people seemed to love it. And Kamanin, in turn,
appreciated that.